About Megan

About Megan McKenzie, one of the artists who created the Unextinction Machine.

Megan was born in the year 2000. Her nickname is Nutmeg. She has finished at Edmund Waller Primary School and is now home schooled. Her favourite activities are drama, creative writing, dance, aikido, watching films and making artworks of all kinds. She’s also very interested in history, archaeology and animals. From an early age, she has enjoyed doing collaborative drawings and drawing games with her dad, Brian. She has learned how to do photography, intaglio etchings, raku ceramic firing and several other processes. See her blog which documents her creative life.

These are some of her artistic achievements:

Setting up her own small creative business called Nutmeg, selling upcycled and handmade toys and accessories. She is particularly keen on crochet, making bags, neckwarmers, hats, wristwarmers, necklaces and jumpers. For this work, she was awarded her Bronze Arts Award.

Learning how to make and edit films and making some short films. She is working towards her Silver Arts Award for filmmaking.

Selling lots of etchings (since age 5) during the Telegraph Hill Festival open studios and exhibiting her etchings in the Hill Station community show

Exhibiting a delicate sculpture called ‘A Bee’s Graveyard’ in the Nunhead Cemetery Open Cities weekend exhibition in September 2010.

Creating an installation called ‘Health and Safety Gone Mad’ in a garden during the Telegraph Hill Open Studios in Spring 2011. This involved lots of satirical cartoon-like yellow warning signs erected around a maze of hazard tape, warning of the terrible dangers lurking around the garden.

Creating and performing a mini show of Mulan in Chinese, with friends Helena and Charles Collins, included in the Nunhead Municipal Museum & Art Gallery programme in March 2011.

Creating a sculpture called Notmeg, inspired by a visit to the Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum, and seeing the film Suckerpunch. See the photos below, the full size self portrait, and secret compartments inside the head.

Collaborating with Brian & Bridget McKenzie to make Fruiting Bodies, an artwork about tree diseases. This is part of the Woodland Wonders exhibition in Nunhead Cemetery throughout September 2011. Megan found and arranged lots of specimens of tree diseases and created three surreal figures made from found pieces of wood.

For more about this work, see here.